SAN FRANCISCO - Lawmakers on Friday requested documents from the White House and Pentagon describing how and when the Bush administration learned the circumstances of Pat Tillman’s death.

The House Oversight Committee is investigating why Tillman’s family and the public were misled about the circumstances of his death. The San Jose native, who turned down a lucrative contract with the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals and joined the Army following the Sept. 11 attacks, was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004.

Although Pentagon investigators determined quickly that he was killed by his own troops, it was five weeks before the actual circumstances of his death were made public. Instead, the Army claimed he had been killed in an enemy ambush.

Committee Chairman Henry Waxman wrote Friday to White House Counsel Fred Fielding requesting “all documents received or generated by any official in the Executive Office of the President ... that relate to Corporal Tillman.”

A second letter was sent to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Among other things, Gates was told to produce all documents related to Tillman generated by the defense secretary’s office and the Pentagon’s office of public affairs, as well as the office of Gen. John Abizaid.

The committee gave the administration until May 18 to produce the documents.

The oversight committee held its first hearing on Tillman’s death earlier this week. Tillman’s family has said they believe the erroneous information peddled by the Pentagon was part of a deliberate cover-up that may have reached all the way to President Bush and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

A White House spokeswoman said this week that Bush did not learn about the unusual circumstances of the Army Ranger’s death until after the soldier’s memorial service on May 3, 2004.

On April 29, a top general sent a memo to Abizaid, who then headed all U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, warning it was “highly possible” that Tillman was killed by friendly fire and making clear that his warning should be conveyed to the president. The White House said there is no indication that Bush received the warning

Two days later, the President mentioned Tillman in a speech to the White House correspondents dinner, but he made no reference to the way he died.

SAN FRANCISCO - The CIA warned the Bush White House seven months before the 2003 Iraq invasion that the U.S. could face a thicket of bad consequences, starting with “anarchy and the territorial breakup” of the country, former CIA Director George Tenet writes in a new book.

CIA analysts wrote the warning at the start of August 2002 and inserted it into a briefing book distributed at an early September meeting of President Bush’s national security team at Camp David, he writes.

While the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been widely criticized for being wrong about much of the prewar intelligence on Iraq, the analysis Tenet describes concerning postwar scenarios seems prescient. Iraq is buffeted by brutal sectarian violence, and there are suggestions that the country be partitioned into ethnic zones.

However, Tenet cautions against concluding that the CIA predicted many of the difficulties that followed. “Doing so would be disingenuous,” because the agency saw them as possible scenarios, not certainties, he writes. “The truth is often more complex than convenient.”

The analysis also presaged an intelligence community conclusion last year that the Iraq war was fueling Islamic resentment toward the United States and giving rise to a new generation of terror operatives.

Tenet’s recollection of the memo also comes at a time when Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress are locked in a high-stakes dispute over war funding and whether to set hard timetables for ending the war.

A copy of the book, “At the Center of the Storm,” was purchased by an Associated Press reporter Friday at a retail outlet, ahead of its scheduled Monday release. Tenet served as CIA chief from 1997 to 2004.

The book is highly critical of Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials, who Tenet argues rushed the United States into war in Iraq without serious debate — a charge the White House rejected Friday. Beyond that, he contends, the administration failed to adequately consider what would come in the war’s aftermath.

“There was precious little consideration, that I’m aware of, about the big picture of what would come next,” Tenet writes. “While some policy makers were eager to say that we would be greeted as liberators, what they failed to mention is that the intelligence community told them that such a greeting would last only for a limited period.”

The former CIA director offers a litany of questions that went unasked:# “What impact would a large American occupying force have in an Arab country in the heart of the Middle East?”# “What kind of political strategy would be necessary to cause the Iraqi society to coalesce in a post-Saddam world and maximize the chances for our success?”# “How would the presence of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, and the possibility of a pro-West Iraqi government, be viewed in Iran? And what might Iran do in reaction?”

Tenet laments that “there seemed to be a lack of curiosity in asking these kinds of questions, and the lack of a disciplined process to get the answers before committing the country to war.”

Tenet assigns his own agency part of the blame, saying the intelligence community should have strove to answer the questions not asked by the administration.

The memoir paints a portrait of constant tension between the CIA and the office of Cheney, who Tenet says stretched the intelligence to serve his own belief that war was the right course.

It alarmed Tenet and surprised even Bush, the author says, when Cheney issued his now-famous declaration that, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

Chastising Cheney nearly five years later, Tenet writes: “Policy makers have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts.” Here again, Tenet blames himself for not pulling Cheney aside and telling him the WMD assertion was “well beyond what our analysis could support.”

For the first time, Tenet offers an account of his own view of a historic moment in the run-up to war: Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 speech before the United Nations, with Tenet sitting just behind him.

“That was about the last place I wanted to be,” Tenet recalls. “It was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn’t hold up,” he says of the performance, in which Powell charged Iraq had WMD stockpiles.

“One by one, the various pillars of the speech, particularly on Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs, began to buckle,” he writes. “The secretary of state was subsequently hung out to dry in front of the world, and our nation’s credibility plummeted.”

Monday, April 16, 2007

prop•a•gan•da (pr p -g n d ) n.1. The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.Public Relations! Its so politically correct. This is information produced by the government or by private corporations the government contracts, to create and distribute information to persuade the opinion of the public. The same public that puts these authority figures into power. We pay the government to set up campaigns to tell us what we should think and we elect them according to the views they manipulated us with and then give them power to act on their will. Does protecting their doctrine really have anything to do with us?

public relationspl.n. Abbr. PR1. (used with a sing. verb) The art or science of establishing and promoting a favorable relationship with the public.We are clearly losing the war in Iraq and spawning an increase in international “terrorism” and yet the government is implanting “favorable” fake news stories into a seemingly normal network news broadcast to persuade the minds of the people. The government must spend billions of dollars on PR or the American public will get mislead. The question is, is it working? There is no favorable news coming out of Iraq because there are no favorable conditions there.

The government has to much influence in the media! Not only is the media already controlled by a few corporations, those corporations are in the business of government. What could be more secure for the corporations than to invest in the government? The Media will print what the Government wants us to know. There is very little independent, non-biased, truth telling, source printing the facts, the facts which are the news.